stillhowlyn's travels 2009

Welcome to our 4th Trip Journal. 2009 marks the beginning of our 14th year traveling full-time in our motorhome. We started out in 1995 in our 31 ft.'91 Dolphin and after 125,000 miles on the odometer decided it was time for a newer model. Howard wanted a diesel. We found the perfect RV (for us) in the form of a 32' 2000 Country Coach Intrigue with one slide-out! Wow, so much room and power! We like to travel the back roads to out-of-the-way destinations, national and state parks, and the larger 40 footers don't work for us. Many friends are "smiling" as they cruise in their "condos on wheels"!

So far we have crossed the USA west to east and north to south many times; north to Alaska and south to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. We have visited most of the provinces in Canada, including Vancouver Island from Victoria to Port Hardy, and circumnavigated the Mexican mainland from border to border. We rented a Class C style "caravan" in the beautiful country of New Zealand and toured both North and South Islands, driving on the "wrong" side of the road with one-lane bridges shared by trains!

Our other travel related interests include sailing. We have bareboat chartered in New Caledonia, the US and British Virgin Islands, St. Martin, St. Barts, Statia, Anguilla, and recently twice in Belize. February 2009 we met up with friends in Placencia, Belize and sailed to Utila, Honduras with several beautiful stops along the way.

We added another travel venue - Renting homes from owners thru VRBO.com. The locations are worldwide, exotic and affordable. A few years back we rented a beautiful home with friends on the west coast of Costa Rica, near Manual Antonio Nat'l Park; then drove a rented car around much of the country, staying in inexpensive hotels. Last year we enjoyed a New Year's trip to a mountain cabin near Lake Tahoe with all our family, and another time a beautiful beach front home on the island of Roatan, Honduras.

We are gypsies and love our lifestyle and are truly blessed! We have a beautiful family near the San Francisco Bay area and spend several months each year with our kids and grandkids. With all the modern means of communication through cell phone and internet we stay connected to friends and family as we travel. I guess you could best sum up our lifestyle philosophy as follows:

"Now the fact was I no longer knew why I was out there traveling. I was out there because I was out there. In the grip of a pleasurable indefinition, floating in a brine of uncertainty, all notions of home, nation, and work had become fluid and conditional. This seemed to me an entirely appropriate state, matching reality. I felt I could carry on like this endlessly, moving from place to place." From Tony Cohan's book, "Mexican Days".